I haven’t actually cut any due to the second thing Ryan posted (raw sheets costing as much or more as pre-cut parts) but did have a friend who was doing it on an inventables machine a few years ago. He found that it eats bits like nothing else, he would get 2 maybe 3 small frames cut per bit before the cut quality went down quick. He also d…[Read more]

Nice. I still need to get this original archim working with Marlin 2.0. Just been too busy to make the changes to the code that it needs 🙁 I Spent the last 3 weeks working on my truck (which meant riding my bike to work, which I swear is uphill both ways) tackling what I thought was a small coolant leak but escalated rapidly to the point of pu…[Read more]

I used my dremel when I first got my MPCNC up and going….I regret that decision to this day.

The dremel is terribly underpowered for use as a spindle. Even at VERY slow speeds I wound up burning out the brushes and damaging the dremel physically (the bushings/bearings they use are a joke – mine is now nice and wobbly.)

My first thought would be to check that your extrusion steps are calibrated correctly. Speed could explain that but it looks to me like it may be under extruding. Here’s a writeup on how to check extrusion calibration:

It’s not very sexy…but it’s dirt cheap <$2 IIRC and I have enough to do 2 or 3 other machines. Adding/removing wires is super quick and easy, no dust builds up. It does a great job keeping the wires off the worktable and out of the way.

Most of the marlin devs are using PlatformIO instead of arduino now – so in the 2.0 branch especially things are breaking on Arduino and not getting patched up right away. At least until they officially release 2.0 it’s probably best to use PlatformIO to build it instead of Arduino – or be ready for issues.

Basically allows more direct access to the steppers and using an external planner instead of letting Marlin do all of the work. The guy working on it has been busy the past few months but recently indicated he hasn’t…[Read more]

Actually…I guess with color it’s possible to kind of see how it relates to the original:

Output:

I tried varying the T “Threshold to create a new stroke” by dropping it from the default 10 down to 5 and then again to 2…but both only resulted in one additional stroke so no not much more detail. I also tried increasing it to 15 and d…[Read more]

I originally built mine as 24″x24″ on a single piece of 3/4″ particleboard with no other support. This was just a “test build” before I expanded it to my final size of 34″x48″ so I could easily fit 20″x30″ sheets of foam board.

I REALLY liked it as a 24″x24″ machine. I built it on our dining room table, so I had to move it every night for d…[Read more]

I keep hoping something MPCNC will show up in Make…I’ve been a subscriber since they announced Make but honestly the last year or two I’ve been thinking about letting my subscription lapse. Just seems like they’re losing their focus and more and more focusing on things you can buy as a maker instead of things you can make 🙁

Hmm, I wonder if that’s what happened on my drag knife test. It was when it went to do a curved corner that it crashed. I keep forgetting to look at the gcode and see what it was trying to do at that point….

I used GRBL on my first little test machine I built a few years back out of some DVD/CD drive components. My biggest complaint were the various gcode senders all seemed flaky and unreliable. Though that was a few years ago and I didn’t find bCNC so things may have improved on that front.